A little gadgetry can go a long way toward helping solve a problem. It’s an approach Shavlik is trying out with a Google Gadget for patch management, Shavlik’s signature technology.

Shavlik announced in a statement today that the Shavlik Google Gadget will look for missing patches, and provide the mechanism to get them in place on the system.

Administrators likely know of Shavlik from either its products, or the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, which the company worked with Microsoft to create. As someone who has used both, I’ve found both effective in a corporate WAN environment.

Being a Google Gadget, it will require the use of Google Desktop. That product has spurred concerns among security pros this year.

In February 2007, an XSS hole in Google Desktop required a fix from Google. Left open, a malicious website could have exploited the issue and grabbed data from someone visiting that site with a vulnerable system.